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Watchlist should show prior unseen revision to a page when filter(s) hide the current revision (Community Wishlist/W410)

Long-term opportunity
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Description

First, note that the scenario described in this wish involves the Watchlist preference "Expand watchlist to show all changes, not just the most recent" not being checked.

See phab:T11790 - created in 2007, and followed up by a wish in 2016 that was well received.

Copied from the ticket:

As a patroller, I want to hide certain edits from my Watchlist, while still being able to see any previous edits which occurred, so that I can better monitor changes on my project.On Special:Watchlist, by default users only see the most recent edit to pages they have watched. Sometimes, however, they don't want to see edits by certain kinds of users, such as bots, or edits marked as 'minor'. Currently, if users filter their Watchlist to remove certain edits, if a page has that kind of edit as its most recent, it simply does not display in their Watchlist at all, instead of displaying the most recent non-filtered edit. This is undesirable, because edits can easily be missed if a subsequent edit is filtered out by a user's configured preferences. A vandal could, for example, vandalise a page, and then make a subsequent minor edit, and users who filter out minor edits would not see their vandalism edit. In fact they wouldn't see that any edit had been made to that page at all - it simply wouldn't display in their watchlist.

As far as I know, this issue persists and needs addressing at long last.

Assigned focus area
Type of wish
Feature request
Tags
Affected users

Vandal hunters, especially, but also practically any user of Watchlists

Phabricator tasks
Other details
  • Created: 08:51, 30 July 2025
  • Last updated: 10:37, 8 April 2026
  • Author: StefenTower (talk)
Voting

This wish currently has 10 supporters. Voting for this wish is open until it is completed.

Supporters of this wish
Support Pppery (talk) 15:43, 10 October 2025
Support Femke (talk) 14:29, 12 October 2025
Support urgent issue to fix, similar to security vulnerabilities in code which are generally fixed as soon as possible so it's deeply problematic this has not been closed after almost two decades(!) – people could simply use eg Citation bot to hide vandalism. The hide-filters would be better if bot edits could also be excluded from multi-edit diffs without affecting human edits but it's still unclear how these changes could be subtracted from a diff. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:18, 23 October 2025
Support A toggle would be nice Polygnotus (talk) 23:52, 23 October 2025
Support Support as author. StefenTower (talk) 01:22, 24 October 2025
Support Jlwoodwa (talk) 16:43, 29 October 2025
Support Jmabel (talk) 00:46, 5 December 2025
Support Garzfoth (talk) 16:36, 21 May 2026
Support Superb Owl (talk) 15:37, 29 May 2026
Support Airypedia (talk) 15:26, 2 June 2026